Life Before Death

The university college previously in charge of the education of most (?) of Sweden’s elementary and high school teachers was merged into Stockholm University a while ago. I think the change was welcomed by most people, since the aforementioned university college was notoriously bad at its task. Now, however, anthroposophers and waldorf-cultists have been given reason to whine a bit. Which is obviously a reason to celebrate, if you prefer scientific truth to superstition.

Stockholm University has decided to cancel the four-year programme for waldorf teachers, which has been conducted in affiliation with the Rudolf Steiner school. The natural science faculty has expressed itself in no uncertain terms through deacon Stefan Nordlund, who according to Dagens Nyheter said this (my translation):

Some of the course literature isn’t just unscientific. It’s also dangerous and teaches faults that are worse than gibberish. We’re supported in our opinion by the humanities/social science faculty.

It’s always refreshing when sane people tell it like it is. In Sweden, the prevailing opinion of waldorf schools is that they’re nice cute places where kids get to paint, dance and play flute a lot instead of being forced to learn multiplication by rote. Not even the minister of education seems entirely aware of the crazy religious ideology running those schools - in a discussion with Christer Sturmark (president of the Swedish Humanist Association) on television he said that he wouldn’t like to entirely forbid religious independent schools as that might affect waldorf schools. As if that’s a bad thing. He, like most of everyone else, seems to think that waldorf is entirely benign.

Wet-on-wet painting cannot possibly harm our children!

anthroposophy, waldorf

For those who think that Sweden being one of the most secular countries in the world means that it’s free of religious nutjobs, think again. Daniel Ocampo Daza reports from a lecture at Uppsala University instigated by Credo, an evangelical christian student organisation:

The speaker Anders Gärdeborn brought up little else but the same ridiculous arguments, misconceptions and misinterpretations, exaggerations, faulty logic and outright lies that you’ve heard over and over, just as I suspected knew. Gärdeborn comes from the fundamentalist and literalistic organization Genesis which claims to “work for a christian view of the sciences and for the biblical view to be heard in the schools and society“. The biblical view being that god created earth its creatures and all of the universe in 6 days.

/…/

As my professor pointed out to me as we were talking prior to the presentation: would the university allow for an astrologer or a holocaust-denialist to come and give a lecture at the university’s facilities unquestioned? Most certainly not. But under the banner of not discriminating against the christian students I guess it is entirely possible, which is telling of why we’re still dealing with this particular brand of counterscientific trash at this level.

science, biology, evolution, creationism

So I just listened to the “debate” between PZ Myers and one Dr Simmons on christian talk radio, which PZ links to here. I’m not going to provide any extensive commentary nor even recommend listening to the debate - sure, it is rather hilarious to hear PZ state matter-of-factly that Simmons has just, and I quote, “made stuff up!” - but since stupid MIGHT be contagious I wouldn’t recommend assaulting your ears with the drivel of an obviously extremely ignorant man.

Really all I wanted to say here is that what I found possibly most amusing in the whole “debate” (and I put those ironic quotation marks there since only one side actually provided any factually true arguments, so it was more of an execution than anything else) was that Dr Simmons actually admitted that his whole reasoning’s based on a gigantic argumentum ad ignorantiam. On talking about the workings of the brain, he ejaculates the following pearl of wisdom:

It’s beyond my comprehension that this could come about by trial and error.

Yes, Dr Simmons, I imagine it is.

In his closing statement, he finally resorts to that which he at at least two points in the interview whined that PZ was doing - insults. To his credit he doesn’t level those insults at PZ, but instead slams Darwin with a big fat ad hominem, calling him a bigotted, misogynistic racist. As if those things (were they even true) had any bearing on the theory of evolution at all. It’s especially ironic since PZ opened the whole debate stating that Darwin’s really out of the picture by now, and Dr Simmons desperately tried to save face by claiming “Darwin” is really just a good name to put on the theory because it’s so well known, even though of course he knows that current evolutuionary theory isn’t the same as Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

Hoooo-boy. I think I’ll go read a biology textbook to purge my mind of the obtuse, infantile nonsense I was just exposed to.

science, biology, evolution, intelligent design, pseudoscience

A vaguely amusing news-item on BBC Health states that:

A range of complementary therapies such as homeopathy and aromatherapy are to be regulated by a new body. /…/ The [Natural HealthCare Council] will set standards and have the power to strike off those deemed incompetent, although membership of the body will be voluntary.

Wow, really? That sounds promising. Except… not so much. I wonder what their definition of “incompetence” is. Will the fact that for instance homeopathy has been shown to be completely ineffectual count towards the incompetence score of homeopaths? I somehow doubt it. What exactly will they be regulating? How nice you are to your customers as you sell them woo? Whether you charge too much (or too little)?

The Natural HealthCare Council will only register practitioners who have a recognised professional qualification, are insured and have signed up to the code of conduct.

Sigh. Actual effectiveness of the “complementary therapy” obviously doesn’t count…

pseudoscience, woo, homeopathy

PZ Myers recently posted some creationist drivel over at Pharyngula, which - unusually - focussed on physics rather than biology. This particular quote has been the subject of much scorn:

Unveils the fundamental truth, based on the scientific record of creation, that the earth accreted from a watery nebula; the great surging mass of water and chemicals had no particular shape and covered thousands of square miles of interstellar space.

Why is this so funny (apart from the idea that volume can be measured in square miles)? Well, personally I’m reminded by someone who, apparently at a loss for what else to say when Hemant at Friendly Atheist asked what we admire about christians, claimed that they “think big”. God is supposedly big. But apparently, the universe isn’t.

The author of the quote - one Parsons - is out by orders of magnitude when it comes to how much water you’d need to form the Earth. One commenter at Pharyngula claims that the earth has “approximately 196 MILLION square miles of surface area. It has, approximately, 26 BILLION cubic miles of material.” (I haven’t bothered to verify these claims, but I do know that they are closer to the truth than Parsons with his thousands of square miles.)

This isn’t the first time a creationist fails to comprehend large things. Recall for instance the Christian grad students who were supposed to teach middle schoolers that 10²⁶² is such a large number that if you attempted to write it down, you would “fill up the entire known universe with paper before you could write that number”. Now, this could mean that whomever wrote that lives in a very very small universe … or they simply had no idea what they were talking about.

Is this symptomatic of something? Does the muddled thinking of creationists ultimately come from an inability to understand, or come to terms with, just how big the world is? Perhaps if these people actually comprehended the true scale of the universe, they would realise the hubris of believing that it was created for the sole purpose of housing bipedal, hairless primates.

science, physics, creationism

So I found this great page that can tell you how you’re feeling at the moment. Based on your date of birth.

Just like I find it fun to occasionally read my horoscope to see what sort of generalised crap they can come up with, I dutifully filled in my date of birth. I mean, who knows, there’s biology involved, perhaps they’re on to something! Ahaha. Hahaha.

So: My eyebrows ever so slightly raised, I read a perfect description of how I’m feeling at the moment. This happens sometimes; astrologers get lucky, Biorhythms will be right sometimes too. But seriously, it was truly spot-on!

Which made it all the more hilarious when I realised I put my birthdate in wrong.

astrology, biorhythm, pseudoscience, superstition